Note: if after the update you notice any unexpected behavior in the web interface, just hit Ctrl-F5 in your browser; that will force the browser to reload the page as well as all back-end scripts and update the ones that may have been cached from previous versions of the software.

Some of our Syncplify.me Server! users prefer to store their users’ home folders (actually VFSs as of version 4.0) on a different machine via shared folders. For example, instead of having your user’s home point to C:\SFTPData\MyUser you want to have it point to \\10.5.123.9\SFTPData\MyUser.

This is a perfectly reasonable and fairly common request. As of version 4.0, Syncplify.me Server! provides a variety of methods to accomplish this goal.

The first step is always the same: creating a VFS that points to the network-shared folder, like this:

Once the VFS is created, you can proceed and create a User profile that uses the newly created VFS as its “home”. And this is where you have many options.

For example, if your entire infrastructure runs on Windows (including the machine that shares the folder) and all your systems are ActiveDirectory-aware, then you can specify the user type as “Active Directory” and impersonate the home VFS as “this user”: Continue reading

While in old versions of Syncplify.me Server! (v1-v3) impersonation capabilities were limited to either no impersonation at all or impersonating the logged-in Windows/AD user, the new Syncplify.me Server! v4 comes with a broader range of possibilities:

None: this is the default choice and it means that the underlying virtual file system (VFS) will be accesses with the same privileges as the Syncplify.me Server! system service (usually the SYSTEM user profile).

By Handle: this is available only when the user profile is a Windows or Active Directory user and it’s equivalent to the type of impersonation found in previous versions of Syncplify.me Server!, basically the user profiles that logged in is also used for impersonation.

By Windows or AD User: this allows you to log in as a normal, Windows or AD user, but then use a different Windows or AD user to access the underlying virtual file system (VFS). Yes, you can log in as normal user “johndoe” and then access your home directory as AD user “j.doe@mycompany.corp”.

By Network Share User: if your NAS has its own user database (which is not integrated with your Windows or AD user database) then you can use this type of impersonation to access paths on your NAS via UNC and authenticate on the NAS itself (ex: \\192.167.172.100\MyProtectedSharedFoloder).

On top of that, each virtual folder has its own impersonation settings, so you can access your home directory as SYSTEM, your “/private_docs” virtual folder as “j.doe@mycompany.corp”, and your “/CorpSharedDocs” folder on your NAS as “CorpNASUser”; all within a single Syncplify.me Server! user profile.